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Camila Alvarez

Professor Faulconer

English Composition II

29 September 2019

Social Influences: Artists Communicating through Social Media Sites

Eight out of ten Instagram users follow a business profile on Instagram. Additionally, 200

million Instagrammers actively visit business profiles daily (Sproutsocial). Instagram has

progressively become a new platform of business for many producers including artists. While

other social media sites such as Twitter, which is more about everyday life, might be focused on

sharing information, Instagram is more picture based making it ideal for promoting artworks

while maintaining a sense of community within the account. Artists, specifically, find numerous

ways to keep their followers involved from hashtag challenges, to giveaways, to shout-outs. I

decided to observe three posts of the artist Laura Heikkala to better understand her genre of

communication.

The first post I studied was a recent drawing contest with a giveaway for two winners to

celebrate reaching a million followers on Instagram. Heikkala drew a traditional watercolor and

ink image of a blue haired girl holding an umbrella with a yellow raincoat in rainy weather titled

The Weather Maker. She included the instructions of the challenge on the second slide of her

post, saying anyone could enter the contest all they had to do was recreate her painting in their

own style and add the hashtag “DrawWithHeikala.” The prizes included a collection of her

favorite tools for colored ink painting and a copy of her book The Art of Heikala or her favorite

watercolor tools and a copy of her book.

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The second post I chose was a progress video of her painting a portrait of a girl

surrounded by maple leaves using an autumn color scheme. In the caption she mentions she will

be participating in Lightbox Expo, a celebration for art where fans can meet their favorite artists

in Los Angeles, and the table number she would be at. She reached almost 200,000 views and

over 150 comments from her followers expressing their excitement. Additionally, the third

artifact I reviewed was a hashtag trend that spread throughout artist accounts during New Year,

where Heikkala posted a collage of her top nine liked artworks of 2018 reflecting and

acknowledging her accomplishments throughout the year while also looking forward to 2019.

While these three posts vary in content, they have underlying connections making them one

genre of communication.

Each post shares three commonalities: audience involvement, consistent content, and

informative updates. The first post I discussed mentioned their milestone of reaching one million

followers and celebrating through a friendly contest. Here, audience involvement is recognized

in two ways, by being able to participate in the challenge and by being one of the one million

followers showing Heikkala their support, because she would not have gotten to where she is if it

were not for the love and support of her followers. In the second post, Heikkala notified her

followers where she would be in Lightbox Expo through a progress video of one of her art

pieces, giving the audience a chance to meet her in person, because as I stated before, they are a

community and the creator wants to be just as involved with her audience as they are with her.

Moreover, the hashtag challenge she did, informed her followers of her top nine liked posts of

2018 while also thanking them for all the encouragement they showed her throughout the year.

Throughout this research paper, I want to understand how social influence is shaping the

genre of communication by artists on multiple social media sites. From the artifacts I have
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collected I know the artist creates a sense of community and unity within her account through

various interactive activities. I do not know how social influence, meaning the change one person

– or a group of people – causes in another, affects the artist and/or the audience, but I believe the

social movement of Instagram and similar social media platforms becoming more business

involved for artists has created different genres of communication between artists and their

communities. As Catherine Savini asks in Looking for Trouble: Finding Your Way into a Writing

Assignment, why is this important? Considering social media has become so encrypted into our

society, the future for artists marketing themselves can be found by observing the genre of

communication used among different platforms. What do I mean by genre? Kerry Dirk writes in

Navigating Genres, “…knowing what a genre is used for can help people to accomplish goals…”

Throughout his paper, he speaks about how the definition of genres has changed throughout

time. A genre is more than “simply filling in a blank,” or responding to a situation, it is what is

expected to accomplish a goal (Dirk 253). Taking that definition into consideration, learning how

to effectively communicate through each social media site can help artists, such as Heikkala,

reach a wider audience while having a specific form of communication can help set artists apart

from others. I do not know yet, but I would like to see if even within different social media sites

the same artists communicate differently with their audiences and why. Perhaps it has to do with

the social influence among each site. Becoming a well-known artist on social media is also a

difficult goal, so I want to know what “famous” artists are doing “right” and if their success leads

to roadblocks for future artists.

To better understand how social influence changes the way each artist uses Twitter,

Instagram, and their websites to communicate, interact, and attract their audiences I will

thoroughly analyze their websites and their top twenty social media posts on each account. By
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studying their content, I can have a better understanding of the picture they want to portray of

themselves as an artist on each platform. I will mainly focus on the pathos and ethos they use in

the form of linguistics and visuals to connect with their audiences.

Pathos is meant to be the emotional appeal to the audience, which can include offering

them a sense of contribution, while ethos is the ethical appeal to the audience, how the artist

maintains their integrity through their work. I plan to note themes most commonly seen

throughout each site and create rhetoric observations: audience involvement (AI), in which the

artist involves the audience for example through friendly competitions or redraw challenges;

artist communication (AC), in which the artists maintains contact with their audience for instance

through replying to comments or participating in a meet and greet; consistent content (CC),

which tracks how often they upload content; skill level (SL), which measures the level of artistic

skill (works in progress or progress videos, commissions, finished pieces, fanart, etc.). I will note

that these categories may overlap if one or more appear in a post.

Using the codes I constructed above, I plan to look at a few artists who have Instagram

and Twitter and analyze about twenty posts of each – selecting them based on how recent they

were posted and the number of likes, views, and/or retweets they received. Assign each to the

categories from before, I will be able to identify which themes are the most and least reoccurring.

This will allow me to see what is most important to different artists to portray to their audiences.

Additionally, I will survey a sample group of people and ask them to classify each post to a

category and see how well the findings align. In other words, how well the artist presents

themselves through their genre of communication and how an audience response to the pathos

and ethos used.

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I am interested in further understanding how this social movement throughout social

media sites has impacted visual content creators and the communities they build within their

accounts. To see where the future of these social influences is heading, I would like to observe

the steps that are being taken now and how to apply them to artists across social media platforms.

Timeline:

1. Annotated Bibliography

2. Organizing a Lit Review

3. Finding Sources

4. Rough Draft

5. Peer Review

6. Introduction

7. Coding Primary Data

8. Peer Review

9. Edit

10. Peer Review

11. Finish Academic Article

12. Begin Multimedia Article

13. ePortfolio Design and Cover Letter

14. Revise and Reflect

15. ePortfolio Peer Review

16. Finalize ePortfolio

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Work Cited

Dirk, Kerry. “Navigating Genres.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, vol. 1, 2010, pp. 249-

262.

Heikkala, Laura. The Weather Maker. Instagram. Sept. 15, 2019.

Heikkala, Laura. Maple. Instagram. Sept. 3, 2019.

Heikkala, Laura. Top Nine. Instagram. Dec. 16, 2019.

Savini, Catherine. “Looking for Trouble: Finding Your Way into a Writing Assignment.”

Writing Spaces: Reading on Writing, vol. 2, 2011, pp. 52-70.

West, Chole. “17 Instagram Stats Marketers Need to Know for 2019.” Sproutsocial,

https://sproutsocial.com/insights/instagram-stats/.